In recent years, the world has witnessed unprecedented energy grabs and supply chain disruptions. The near-perfect alignment between big governments, big banks and corporations should be a serious cause for concern throughout the agricultural sector. These measures represent nothing less than the most serious threats to our freedom and survival as companies, probably even as individuals. If you champion resilience and biodiversity, bitcoin should be a natural choice. Ultimately, bitcoin protects biodiversity.
The concentration of power and money had begun long before COVID hysteria gripped the world. The corporatization of the agricultural sector has been my main concern long before the legalization hype began. We all knew, deep down, that the cannabis space had the potential to become the ugliest manifestation of Big Ag, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma all at once. It is happening before our very eyes and many of us feel helpless in the face of this trend. While most members of the industry have struggled to obtain the most basic financial services that any legitimate business is entitled to, a parallel financial system has emerged that now represents a very serious alternative to the broken legacy system. Let's take a little look at what our options are and how they support our dream vision for the cannabis industry, medicinal plants, but also for the entire agricultural sector.
The broken legacy system
We are familiar with the credit-based scheme administered by the central bank that creates money out of thin air, distributed unfairly throughout the economy, mainly to insiders, while the plebs receive crumbs to survive and pay interest to crony bankers. Consumers and businesses alike increasingly take credit for getting ahead and acquiring the assets they need to prosper or, sometimes, unfortunately, simply to satisfy advertising-induced cravings. hold a capital intensive Cultivation operation under these conditions is a real challenge. Add in the regulatory burden and you have a perfect recipe for the destruction of family businesses.
You may be wondering how monetary policy, plant breeding, and plant patents are related. Well, the fiduciary system encourages a pension scheme, where concentration of power and resources becomes the norm and where artificial moats prevent any new competitors from entering the market to provide better options for society. Cronyism goes hand in hand with predatory ownership tactics. To pay off your debt or offer expected returns to investors, Innovators need to acquire exclusive rights to biology (e.g. plant varieties) to obtain unjustified and unreasonable margins over long periods of time on a newly bred variety.. At scale, this system incentivizes breeders to limit access to their cultivars, preventing any other breeders from improving the gene pool, ultimately destroying biodiversity by creating single points of failure in the preservation effort. It also encourages predatory practices against farmers and producers who face heavy fines and penalties for inadvertently violating patents by growing such patented varieties. Ask the corn and cotton farmers who were rekt by Bayer, Syngenta or Dupont after their fields were cross-pollinated with proprietary pollen from neighboring fields during windy days…
Let me pause to clarify something. technology patents can be absolutely legitimate in enabling returns from capital-intensive R&D. However, the patents on biology They are unethical for 2 main reasons:
- They take advantage of an existing gene pool found in the public domain, sometimes called “common” (i.e., large agricultural companies initially used public domain varieties to generate proprietary varieties).
- They encourage the development of GMOs and, ultimately, transhumanism.
In the agricultural world, it seems that the more central banks print money, the more markets become concentrated and the less innovation reaches the market. In the context of plant breeding, biodiversity is inversely correlated with the money supply, where sterile monocultures are encouraged by law. Despite these increasing predatory ownership practices, debt levels are at an all-time high across the cannabis industry. Most of these zombie corporations will never pay their debt. The house of cards will hurt many with its fall, including the lowly players who built the entire space, such as family businesses.
The cannabis industry has been consolidating at a worrying rate in recent years. Canada and California are far from the dream of legalization that many of us had. Legacy farms are being pushed out of the market and low-quality corporate mids (cannabis that is not the best quality) sprayed with synthetic terpenes (i.e. artificial flavors) are flooding the market. We are all familiar with this race to the bottom pattern.
There should be room for high-quality artisanal products. It is difficult to bring these products to market in a fiat-based system that requires increasing economies of scale and start-up capital. Instead of consolidating the industry based on capital expenditures into artificial moats like plant patents, a bitcoin-focused industry would fairly reward artisanal producers for the quality they bring to the market, not their moats.
If you're a human-scale gamer and want to make a living from your passion for the plant, what are the best tools to have on hand? You should already know that Open source genetic improvement is the most suitable intellectual property strategy for small breeders.. You don't want to fight the patent war with your limited means; against friendly corporations that are located right next to the money printer. But how can you win the open source game using unqualified fiat money? Well, here comes bitcoin.
The new paradigm: healthy money
Sound money can be sold across space, time, and scale, and appropriately stores value for its hard-working holders, while respecting their privacy. It is money from value creators, not pensioners. It is the right money to reward breeders who improve and maintain the gene pool that ultimately benefits consumers. It is scarce money that creates the conditions of abundance and biodiversity. But how?
Imagine getting paid for your work in a currency that appreciates over time and preserves the value of your work—in other words, the energy you spend growing plants, selecting phenotypes, generating new seeds, selecting them, and packaging them. Imagine a currency that allows you to transact with people anywhere in the world, without asking anyone's permission and without deceiving you. This is a major revolution for producers and breeders who have been denied banking services and have had to rely on cash to settle transactions, with all the risks that entails.
bitcoin is an instantaneous, trustless and permissionless transaction between parties. It allows breeders and producers to live from their passion, what they do best: cultivate and improve. Breeders should not have to play the litigation game to enforce patents and defend their annuities to keep up with inflation and pay interest on printed money. Those who resort to it usually regret it when they realize they can't win at the Big Ag game; After all, the rules of the proprietary game are written by and for the cantillons. Small and medium-sized businesses cannot win this game in the long run because patent enforcement requires substantial cash flows. Getting into the plant patent game is a sure way to sell out in the future, or simply get pushed out of the market by bigger players.
Any entrepreneur seeking financial autonomy and, ultimately, freedom wants to convert the energy spent into hard money. With bitcoin, the incentive to compromise biodiversity to maximize annuities to offset the melting of fiat money disappears. With bitcoin, breeders and producers can focus on their craft while storing the fruits of their labor long-term in the strongest money available. bitcoin therefore allows many small players to be part of the agricultural sector: it encourages antifragility, competition and biodiversity.
This is not the only problem that bitcoins solve for the cannabis industry. Settlement of transactions has been a central issue. Excluded from the traditional banking system, too many legally operating businesses have had to rely on cash to settle transactions. Sitting on piles of cash in today's world is impractical and, in fact, dangerous. Meanwhile, these same companies pay taxes like any other. Taxation without financial representation. bitcoin solves this. Due to its trustless and intermediary nature, bitcoin allows cannabis businesses to securely settle transactions, without relying on banks or payment processors. Who wants to pay expensive processing fees and beg for basic services from financial institutions that disdained this industry for years? Why not turn this obstacle into a competitive advantage? Instead of jumping through hoops to be accepted into the moribund legacy system, the entire cannabis industry should migrate to bitcoin and get ahead of the game, ultimately creating the model for the broader agricultural sector.
This is a guest post by Remnantal. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of btc Inc or bitcoin Magazine.
